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A toll-free telephone number or freephone number is a telephone number that is billed for all arriving calls. For the calling party, a call to a toll-free number from a landline is free of charge. A toll-free number is identified by a dialing prefix similar to an area code. The specific service access varies by country.
Subscriber trunk dialling (STD), also known as subscriber toll dialing, is a telephone numbering plan feature and telecommunications technology in the United Kingdom and various Commonwealth countries for the dialling of trunk calls by telephone subscribers without the assistance of switchboard operators.
A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, reachable by a system of destination code routing. Telephone numbering plans are defined in each of the administrative regions of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and in private telephone networks.
In the United Kingdom, telephone numbers are administered by the Office of Communications (Ofcom). For this purpose, Ofcom established a telephone numbering plan, known as the National Telephone Numbering Plan, which is the system for assigning telephone numbers to subscriber stations.
The French telephone numbering plan is used in Metropolitan France, French overseas departments and some overseas collectivities.
In Argentina, area codes are two, three, or four digits long. Local customer numbers are six to eight digits long. The total number of digits is ten, for example, phone number (11) 1234-5678 for Buenos Aires is made up of a 2-digit area code number and an 8-digit subscriber's number, while (383) 123-4567 would be an example of a Catamarca number.
The Big Number Change addressed various issues with the telephone dialling plan in the United Kingdom, during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Numbers on the Irish telephone numbering plan are regulated and assigned to operators by ComReg.
Widespread UK telephone code misconceptions, in particular brought on by the Big Number Change in 2000, have been reported by regulator Ofcom since publication of a report it commissioned in 2004.
Regulation of the telephone numbers in Serbia is under the responsibility of the Regulatory Agency of Electronic Communication and Mail Services (RATEL), independent regulatory authority. The country calling code of Serbia is +381. The country has an open telephone numbering plan, with most numbers consisting of a 2- or 3-digit calling code and a 6-7 digits of customer number.
Telephone numbers in the Philippines follow an open telephone numbering plan and an open dial plan. Both plans are regulated by the National Telecommunications Commission, an attached agency under the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).
Telephone numbers in Italy are managed by the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM), a national regulatory authority for the communication industry located in Rome.
This is a discussion of telephone numbers in Ukraine. The nation of Ukraine has country code +380. It switched to the European Union's common dialing plan in 2009. Thus, Ukrainian phone numbers consist of a 2-digit zone code, an optional subzone code, an optional filler, and the local phone number. However, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk were given Russian telephone codes instead, as if they were following telephone numbers in Russia, by Russian authorities.
Telephone numbers in the Republic of China (Taiwan) use a system of area codes, beginning 02 to 08. The leading digit(s) following the area code denote the network operator (Chunghwa Telecom and its competitors). Mobile numbers begin 09. The international code for calls into Taiwan is 886.
The regulation of telephone numbers in Germany is the responsibility of the Federal Network Agency of the German government. The agency has a mandate to telecommunications in Germany and other infrastructure systems.
Telephone numbers in Russia are administered by Roskomnadzor, and Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation. Russia's National Numbering Plan (NNP) is a four-level telephone numbering plan with local, zone, country, and international scopes, implementing a closed numbering plan, in which the number of digits of all national significant numbers (NSN) assigned to subscriber telephones is fixed at ten, with three digits for the area code, and a seven-digit subscriber number which includes a zone code of up to two digits. Internationally, Russia participates in the numbering plans of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) provided by recommendations E.164 and E.123, using the telephone country code 7.
National conventions for writing telephone numbers vary by country. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) publishes a recommendation entitled Notation for national and international telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Web addresses. Recommendation E.123 specifies the format of telephone numbers assigned to telephones and similar communication endpoints in national telephone numbering plans.
A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices for data transmission via the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or other public and private networks.
Telephone numbers in the United Kingdom have a flexible structure that reflects their historical demands, starting from many independent companies through a nationalised near-monopoly, to a system that supports many different services, including cellular phones, which were not envisaged when the system was first built. Numbers evolved in a piecemeal fashion, with numbers initially allocated on an exchange-by-exchange basis for calls connected by manual operators. Subscriber numbers reflected demand in each area, with single digit telephone numbers in very rural areas and longer numbers in cities.
References
- Irish Telephony Numbering & Dialling Plan Status Report (PDF), ComReg, 2 January 2008, retrieved 3 February 2010
- Geographic Telecommunications Numbering Areas (PDF), ComReg, 11 December 2003, retrieved 3 February 2010
- ITU allocations list